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Dumb is more or less uniformly-distributed, and with a rising population there is only rising dumb.

A tide of dumb, if you will, perpetually increasing. A melt in the polar dumb-caps.

Tangentially:

I was party to some encounters between self-professed liberals and strippers during which it became painfully evident that the former were more interested in peddling conservative social mores than in subverting patriarchal or otherwise unhealthy sex industry norms. I think they were made of pure irony. Such people were sorta mythical to me prior to those encounters. I thought feminists ranged from normal, reasonable people to naive "I want to hug a prostitute" do-gooders. Alas, no, there's more spectrum.

Also, a friend who earned ridiculous amounts of cash stripping during graduate study said at the time that she felt she was taking advantage of a female nightclub owner. She continued stripping for more than a year after her dissertation because it paid better than the research jobs she could find. Now she develops glassy metals and she's told me that she's considered stripping again several times because it felt like a less-sexist job. Her male and female patrons were apparently more well-behaved than her current clientele and coworkers. I gather this isn't a mega-rare phenomenon.

Anyway, I'm conflicted about the sex industry. Much of it is horrendously exploitative and in many areas it's just slavery, but I think outright prohibition of "vices" probably ends up being counterproductive, especially if the prohibition isn't done in concert with some form of social aid and/or change in cultural awareness (in which case prohibition necessarily entails booming illicit trade). I'm all for regulation, ofc. iyam alcohol should be more heavily-restricted in most US states than it currently is, but then I've been called both a regressive Puritan and an unscrupulous sex-slavery advocate... maybe I'm just scatterbrained. Probably.

That was the act I was referencing when I said the one that covers lolicon. It still defines pornography as: "of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal". Also of the same act it has to fall into this definition:

The referenced image clearly isn't pornography in that sense at all. The CPS would never take it near a court and a jury would never convict. In the same way a picture of your children in swimming suits would never count either, no matter what the tabloids would say.

I feel a need to make it clear that the laws in the UK while stupid in some regards aren't as bad as being made out.

For what it's worth, I was more concerned about images escalating than that particular image in question, however there are laws relating to The Coroners and Justice Act which mean for those that are predispositioned to find such images arousing, viewing those images is illegal. Unfortunately, the site I have all my sources for this kind of thing on is experiencing some database difficulties atm so I can't dig it out easily. Anyhow, I'll stop derailing [until I find it at least :P]

EDIT: seems it was based mostly around the Tom O'Carroll case, which was overturned on appeal a couple of years after the conviction, but demonstrated that a particularly zealous judge could convict based upon interpretation. Of course, a decent lawyer could have pointed to precedent, but given the tightening of laws in 2010 that's a hard case to push.

Seriously? A country where I couldn't get a beer or wine with my meal at 16 or even 18 is a poor excuse for a country.

Though that leads to a point, which is people are capable of far maturer relationships with things if the society they live in is less hung up about it.

I should've said "alcohol-related crimes should be more heavily-punished than they are". So if you're the boob who sped past me swerving across both lanes on I-64 yesterday (only to be pulled over by a statie up by the Rockport exit), then you should mandatorily pay a $5,000 USD fine (regardless of BAC) and do 100 hours of community service and have your license revoked for six months with a year of probation. And you should be slapped with a stinky dead trout in a public square.

I don't know if you've ever seen what a half a five year-old looks like after it's been towed a quarter mile by a drunken imbecile, but I have. Yes, it's anecdotal, and yes, it's emotional, but people around here don't have the discipline to drink responsibly, and therefore they should be fucked over by the state until they can manage it. These people will get their fill regardless of the law (there are active outlaw stills all over my county) but dammit, that doesn't mean we should just let them be reckless morons.

I'd rather these hicks pass around a doobie than get sloshed, tbh, but thanks to the tides of history and culture these utter goons think cannabis is of the devil and alcohol is their god-given birthright.

*shrug* Sorry for the threadjack.

/edit: and fwiw, the drunken dweeb I was referring to wasn't a classless inbred hill-dweller; those types aren't really that common here. It was a cookie-cutter frat guy.

Dumb is more or less uniformly-distributed, and with a rising population there is only rising dumb.

A tide of dumb, if you will, perpetually increasing. A melt in the polar dumb-caps.

Tangentially:

I was party to some encounters between self-professed liberals and strippers during which it became painfully evident that the former were more interested in peddling conservative social mores than in subverting patriarchal or otherwise unhealthy sex industry norms. I think they were made of pure irony. Such people were sorta mythical to me prior to those encounters. I thought feminists ranged from normal, reasonable people to naive "I want to hug a prostitute" do-gooders. Alas, no, there's more spectrum.

Also, a friend who earned ridiculous amounts of cash stripping during graduate study said at the time that she felt she was taking advantage of a female nightclub owner. She continued stripping for more than a year after her dissertation because it paid better than the research jobs she could find. Now she develops glassy metals and she's told me that she's considered stripping again several times because it felt like a less-sexist job. Her male and female patrons were apparently more well-behaved than her current clientele and coworkers. I gather this isn't a mega-rare phenomenon.

Anyway, I'm conflicted about the sex industry. Much of it is horrendously exploitative and in many areas it's just slavery, but I think outright prohibition of "vices" probably ends up being counterproductive, especially if the prohibition isn't done in concert with some form of social aid and/or change in cultural awareness (in which case prohibition necessarily entails booming illicit trade). I'm all for regulation, ofc. iyam alcohol should be more heavily-restricted in most US states than it currently is, but then I've been called both a regressive Puritan and an unscrupulous sex-slavery advocate... maybe I'm just scatterbrained. Probably.

I think there are two things here, and both of them are something of an American phenomenon:

First is that our party of labor rights and general populism - the Democrats - has historically also been the party of puritan ethics and moral guardians. Those old Progressive Era progressives were the ones who were also the temperance movement types and the eugenics types alongside the union types. As such, being the big tent party that our system tended and tends to hold, we've had a real "you get the whole package" deal, which puts the labor rights question (sex workers are workers, too) in direct opposition with the moral guardian issue (women shouldn't be subjected to this debasement). You usually know which one you're dealing with, however, depending on whether the person you're dealing with frames the argument in a labor way or a trafficking way.

Second is that our strip clubs - depending on the local jurisdiction - have a lot of regulations and a lot of enforcers of those regulations compared to other workplaces. Now, if every engineering lab had two bouncers...

Last edited by Nalano; 07-05-2013 at 11:29 PM.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

I should've said "alcohol-related crimes should be more heavily-punished than they are". So if you're the boob who sped past me swerving across both lanes on I-64 yesterday (only to be pulled over by a statie up by the Rockport exit), then you should mandatorily pay a $5,000 USD fine (regardless of BAC) and do 100 hours of community service and have your license revoked for six months with a year of probation. And you should be slapped with a stinky dead trout in a public square.

'Course, to do so you'd be coming up against the two largest interests outside of firearms: cars and booze. Won't somebody please think of the poor brewers in all this? If their customers get their licenses revoked, how could they get to the drive-thru liquor marts?

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

I think there are two things here, and both of them are something of an American phenomenon:

First is that our party of labor rights and general populism - the Democrats - has historically also been the party of puritan ethics and moral guardians. Those old Progressive Era progressives were the ones who were also the temperance movement types and the eugenics types. As such, being the big tent party that our system tended and tends to hold, we've had a real "you get the whole package" deal, which puts the labor rights question (sex workers are workers, too) in direct opposition with the moral guardian issue (women shouldn't be subjected to this debasement). You usually know which one you're dealing with, however, depending on whether the person you're dealing with frames the argument in a labor way or a trafficking way.

Second is that our strip clubs - depending on the local jurisdiction - have a lot of regulations and a lot of enforcers of those regulations compared to other workplaces. Now, if every engineering lab had two bouncers...

Yeah. Being from relatively small-town areas of the Midwest (and getting to the coasts infrequently as I do) the vast majority of my experience with Democrats is with the kind whose only chance at election comes from professing social conservatism. Thankfully at least on the local level there's a rise in independents (but that'll never change much at state/national level with our system).

On a personal note: the aforementioned lady wanted me to see her friend dance at her strip club and I disliked the experience; it was very embarrassing and uncomfortable. The dance was artful and athletic and impressive; I just retain some of my kin's conservative ways and I can't get past them. I've since been taken to raunchy and bawdy burlesque and pole performances that weren't in what we might call classical "imagine sexing me, guys!"-type strip joints and I found them great.

Unsurprisingly, I like the aesthetics of lithe, fit dancers gyrating in artful, fun and often-suggestive ways... I just dislike when crowds of mostly-guys gather to get a collective boner in the vicinity. I just can't (personally) abide that. I know there's a hypocrisy in there, but I also know I'm not the only guy who can take in a burlesque or poledance performance without imagining sexytimes or wanting to touch the performers or be danced on. My foibles!

Originally Posted by Zephro

Oh drunk drivers are a different thing but yeah they are massive pricks. I believe we got our drunk driving stats down here without people drinking any less.

The labour party here was also closely tied to the temperance movement. Though maybe not as strongly.

It's bad here in Indiana and I imagine it's not good elsewhere in the US. And lest you think I'm just a "punish them into a fine paste" reactionary, I don't think punishment alone will work. Something like 1/3 of DWI/DUI arrests are of repeat offenders, and they can probably be broken financially and socially without any real effect on the underlying problem...

As Nalano pointed out (and without getting too conspiratorial) an awful lot of political money here stinks of booze.

On a personal note: the aforementioned lady wanted me to see her friend dance at her strip club and I disliked the experience; it was very embarrassing and uncomfortable. The dance was artful and athletic and impressive; I just retain some of my kin's conservative ways and I can't get past them. I've since been taken to raunchy and bawdy burlesque and pole performances that weren't in what we might call classical "imagine sexing me, guys!"-type strip joints and I found them great.

Unsurprisingly, I like the aesthetics of lithe, fit dancers gyrating in artful, fun and often-suggestive ways... I just dislike when crowds of mostly-guys gather to get a collective boner in the vicinity. I just can't (personally) abide that. I know there's a hypocrisy in there, but I also know I'm not the only guy who can take in a burlesque or poledance performance without imagining sexytimes or wanting to touch the performers or be danced on. My foibles!

It's actually kinda funny: To me, as a guy from the coasts, there's a clear distinction between strip clubs and burlesque theaters: The former are women writhing around for the perverse enjoyment of men, the latter are women writhing around for the empowerment of women - and you'll notice that the vast majority of the audience for burlesque shows here are women.

But that moralism thing: Sex slavery is obviously a horribly bad thing, but in what manner is it substantively different than any other slavery or trafficking in people? This isn't actually a leading question, much as it sounds like one.

Last edited by Nalano; 08-05-2013 at 12:15 AM.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

Yeah it seems to be around 31% of all traffic accidents in the US but only 5% in the UK (also 4 times as many accidents per head of population), and we are not known for our sobriety. I think it was an incredibly long running crack down by the police combined with lots of educational programs. But booze isn't really the problem in that equation I think.

Political parties here are also linked with breweries and such. The difference may just be that the state is more powerful to boss us around, for our own good in this case. When I was very young it was quite common for people to drink drive but since the late 90s it's been an unbelievable social faux pas, admitting to drunk driving might as well be bad as admitting to physically assaulting someone's grandma.

But that moralism thing: Sex slavery is obviously a horribly bad thing, but in what manner is it substantively different than any other slavery or trafficking in people? This isn't actually a leading question, much as it sounds like one.

Right. Nick Mailer talked about that in a past Rum Doings (a podcast John Walker does with his friend). Undoubtedly much of it is a social construct. I wonder how much of it could be mitigated. If we could get rid of the stigma and fear of ostracization, would whatever physical and psych component remains be worse than the physical & psych damage of slave labor?

If it turned out sex slavery was indeed more damaging (in some meaningful sense) what would that entail? Harsher penalties for sex slavers than for labor slavers? I guess so.

If it turned out sex slavery was indeed more damaging (in some meaningful sense) what would that entail? Harsher penalties for sex slavers than for labor slavers? I guess so.

Considering your suggested penalties for drunk drivers, I suspect the distinction between the two is "how much do you want us to kill you?"

I mean, I don't know if I long for a time where you have Local 69 of Sex Workers United marching on city hall in neon go go boots demanding compensation and hiring preferences based on seniority, but getting it all out in the open - and proudly - would certainly send quite a few cockroaches scattering.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

And again, the drunk driving thing is just a personal passion; if the desired end (less drunk driving) could be achieved via less-draconian means, I'd be all for it. It's probably just elitism on my part but something tells me many of the offenders in my area wouldn't respond to other deterrents and wouldn't take kindly to any sort of concerted push for cultural change.

And again, the drunk driving thing is just a personal passion; if the desired end (less drunk driving) could be achieved via less-draconian means, I'd be all for it. It's probably just elitism on my part but something tells me many of the offenders in my area wouldn't respond to other deterrents and wouldn't take kindly to any sort of concerted push for cultural change.

Cultural change to me sounds like the difference between drinking cultures in New York and Texas.

New York drinking is: You drink 'til you fall over as the bars stick around 'til 4am (and if you act civilized, 5am), you get a nightcap at the 24/7 supermarkets that sell liquor, you pour yourself into a 24/7 taxi or meander into the 24/7 subway or simply walk back because the bar's two blocks away, and you wake up at home in time for endless mimosas.

Texas drinking is: You drink until the bartender cuts you off (I was once cut off due to a standing rule of three drinks per visit at some place in Houston, an egregious indignity until the designated driver circumvented it by buying three more drinks in her name and promptly handing them to me) or the bar closes at 2am, then you go sit in the "cooling off" section of the bar until you're sober enough to drive home, as public transit is a tale dreamed up by scurrilous wags back east.

Long story short, if you don't want drunk driving, you present alternative means to get to and from watering holes.

Last edited by Nalano; 08-05-2013 at 04:30 AM.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

My neighbors wouldn't subsidize a drunkard taxi service, which is what'd be necessary in these godforsaken "I can't tell where the hateful burbs end and the sticks begin" sprawl-towns. There's a bar down by the river with not a domicile in six miles. Plenty of docks, though, and plenty of drunkards drowning year after year. It's something of a self-correcting problem; there's just not quite enough self-correction, if you get my drift. I'm compassionate enough when I'm in a state of detached reasoning, but... being brought up by "mind yer own business" conservative libertarian types, I often think "I don't care if they kill themselves, I just don't want 'em killing others".

I don't really want 'em to kill themselves via alcohol, but I'll be damned if I'm going argue about the responsibilities of drink with Earl Bishop McMasterton III, lawn-ornament aficionado, coal-miner and avid thimble collector (yes, I've met that man). I can shoot the shit with most anyone, and I did with him, but... ain't nobody gonna convince him that, er, he oughtn't drive after a "sip" (I'll let you be the judge of what lightnin'-volume a "sip" might entail).